The Anvil Arts – Why Original Sin?
At Anvil Arts, our role is not just to offer our audiences great works of the past, but to commission, develop and present work from the present day. To fail to do this would be to risk The Anvil and The Haymarket becoming merely wonderful museums. The challenge is to find new work that is appropriate both to the performance spaces and the audiences.
When we first read the script of Original Sin, it was immediately apparent that here was such a work. While set in the past and in a location which most of us can only imperfectly imagine, it raises questions which remain important today. The exercise of power and its abuses; the battle of the sexes; the nature of religious vocation and the ills committed in the name of a supposedly benign deity; the morality of using information obtained by torture: the play ranges widely in its scope.
More importantly than all of these, it is a well-written play with fascinating, three-dimension characters. The events of the play and the issues it explores grow naturally out of the relationships between these characters, as in all good drama. The final scene, while a satisfying resolution of what has gone before, provides food for continuing thought, rather than simply closing off the characters’ lives to end the story.
